“I want to see the Middle East return to real peace, a lasting peace,” Donald J. Trump declared on Oct. 26, 2024, as he campaigned for Arab American votes in Michigan, “and we will get it done properly.”
This pledge appealed to Arab American voters who were angry about the Biden Administration’s support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Tens of thousands of them abandoned their prior loyalty to the Democratic Party and threw their support to Trump, helping him win the swing state decisively.
Although Trump’s pledge was vague on details, on Tuesday, he seemed to lay out his vision for peace: moving Palestinians out of Gaza and redeveloping it as some sort of American territory, or at least for the U.S. to take temporary control to rebuild Gaza. Trump pledged to create “thousands and thousands of jobs, and it will be something the entire Middle East can be proud of.” Not surprisingly, this proposal provoked fierce resistance and puzzlement from Middle Eastern stakeholders, U.S. allies, and even some Congressional Republicans. The reality is that any initiative to achieve a “real peace” will require resolution of the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The most promising potential outcome remains the “two-state solution,” involving the creation of a State of Palestine committed to living in peace and harmony with Israel.
If history is any guide, however, the two-state solution will be difficult to achieve anytime soon. Past pursuits of it have confounded U.S. Presidents. To reach it, Trump would have to find a path through a political minefield of competing Israeli and Palestinian interests and aspirations, reverse his own first-term policies, and risk alienating his domestic political base.
The prospect of an Arab Palestinian state was conceived in the 1930s by British officials who contemplated partitioning their beleaguered Palestine mandate into a Jewish state (which Britain had implicitly endorsed in the Balfour Declaration of 1917) and an Arab state. In 1947, the U.N. officially embraced such a solution, and the Jewish community of Palestine declared the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948.
Yet the U.N.’s endorsement did not mean that Arab Palestinians accepted the partition of what they saw as entirely their territory. Instead, they refrained from declaring a Palestinian state and, with the backing of neighboring Arab states, resisted the creation of Israel with force.
This resistance would last for decades, resulting in several wars. Israel, however, not only survived the pan-Arab hostility, but it also prevailed on the battlefields and expanded its territorial domain beyond the original partition borders. Notably, in the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967, Israel launched a successful preemptive attack against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, occupying territory previously controlled by each of them, including the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
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The 1967 war prodded the U.N. to reaffirm support for a two-state solution, this time as part of a “land-for-peace” formula under which Israel would relinquish these territories to the Arab powers and they would, in turn, agree to peacefully accept Israel’s existence. But progress toward such a goal was slow, with Egypt and Syria staging a surprise attack in 1973 to regain their lost territory, only to have these efforts fail.
Egypt did not officially recognize Israel until 1979, when, in a U.S. brokered agreement, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for the end of three decades of hostility. The treaty was a smaller version of the land-for-peace deal envisioned by the U.N. in 1967: Egypt restored sovereignty over its lost territory while Israel gained stability and security on its southwestern frontier. Yet it failed to include the other Arab nations, or, most importantly, the Arab Palestinians.
Beginning in the 1980s, U.S. Presidents of both parties actively pursued the two-state solution involving Israel and the Arab Palestinians. In 1989 and 1990, the George H.W. Bush Administration promoted negotiations to end the first intifada — a Palestinian uprising that erupted in 1987 — on a land-for-peace basis. In 1991, Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker also welcomed Palestinians to the multilateral Madrid conference, the first face-to-face meeting between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Two years later, the process took a major step forward when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization agreed to the Oslo Accord, pledging both sides to “strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation.”
President Bill Clinton pounced on the opportunity and championed a vigorous peace process. He facilitated historic handshakes, negotiated settlement plans, and even midwifed the Palestinian Authority into existence as a proto-state. But the Oslo process fell short of its potential as extremists in both camps used violence to spoil the mood for compromise and negotiating positions hardened. As a result, despite his focused attention and earnest efforts at arbitration, in 2000, Clinton’s last-ditch attempt to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal at the Camp David Summit failed.
That didn’t deter Clinton’s successors from trying to achieve a land-for-peace deal. In the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush formulated the “Roadmap to Peace” to fulfill his vision of “two states, living side by side in peace and security.” His successor, Barack Obama, echoed this policy goal during a major address in Cairo in June 2009 and dispatched Special Envoy George Mitchell and Secretary of State John Kerry to the Middle East to achieve it.
Yet, both Bush and Obama accomplished far less than Clinton did in terms of advancing the peace process. On their watch, the two-state vision atrophied. Israel and the Palestinians failed to agree on myriad technical aspects of a new Palestinian state despite tireless arbitration by U.S. diplomats. The result was violence, both during the second intifada between 2000 and 2005, and in a series of deadly battles between Israel and Hamas in and near Gaza between 2008 and 2014. Indeed, in the past decade and a half, Israeli politics drifted towards conservative authoritarianism and Palestinian politics descended into corruption, division, and extremism, eroding the willingness of either side to trust the other or to compromise on anything.
By strongly favoring Israel during his first term, President Trump deviated dramatically from the standard support for the two-state solution displayed by his predecessors. He found that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories — fortified residential communities populated by Israeli settlers on land that had been part of plans for a Palestinian state — were not illegal, breaking the precedent followed by all previous presidents and other governments. He bucked conventions by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, relocating the U.S. Embassy there, and acknowledging Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights.
Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner cleared his plan for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before releasing it publicly and, unsurprisingly, it sided with Israel on every dispute. The Kushner plan proposed creating a Palestinian state, but one infused with Israeli settlements, stripped of 30% of the West Bank, lacking equal access to Jerusalem, prohibited from fielding a military, and dependent on Israel for its national defense. When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas balked at those terms, Trump instead secured the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel and four Arab-majority states and thereby eroding pan-Arab solidarity in support of Palestinian rights.
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If Trump’s favoritism for Israel put the two-state solution into cardiac arrest, the Israel-Hamas war of 2023-24 placed it on life support. The brutal Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 stoked the anger of Israel’s hawks and eviscerated the credibility of its doves. Netanyahu declared his firm opposition to Palestinian statehood and signaled that his government would permanently annex the West Bank. His relentless and deadly pummeling of Gaza and his authorization of low-intensity violence to uproot Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank seemed to indicate intention to dominate these territories, ideally with Palestinians removed.
Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and its besting of Iran in recent exchanges of firepower have emboldened Netanyahu to pursue maximal objectives vis-a-vis the Palestinians. He seems determined to replace “land-for-peace” with “domination through power.”
Those voters who pulled the lever for Trump because of his pledge to bring “real peace” to the Middle East can cite reasons to hope for such an accomplishment. Yet this history indicates that doing so would require reversing many of his first term positions, as well as the rhetoric of both Trump and his incoming foreign policy team. Trump campaigned as Israel’s “big protector.” He cherishes the support of evangelical Christians, who are ardently pro-Israel for theological reasons. Meanwhile the pro-Israel hawks he has appointed to key roles in his administration have gone even further. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, criticized the Biden Administration for advising restraint on Israel’s military actions in Gaza, while his ambassador-designate to Israel Mike Huckabee declared that “Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical names for the West Bank.
Yet, the 77-year history of the quest for a two-state solution exposes that the opposite of such posturing is needed to negotiate a successful land-for-peace deal. Such an agreement will demand a neutral arbiter who can address the aspirations, earn the confidence, and garner the support of both Israel and the Palestinians. Even someone like Bill Clinton, who managed to do so, still failed to overcome the enormous hurdles required to achieve such a deal. And Trump’s challenge would be even greater than the one that faced Clinton: he will also need to overcome the intense Israeli-Palestinian animosity that has grown dramatically since the Oslo process stalled 25 years ago—and has only escalated further since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack.
The reality then is that despite Trump’s pledge, a two-state solution seems more improbable today that at any time since the 1980s. Without it, achieving “real peace” in the Middle East will be difficult.
Peter L. Hahn is arts and sciences distinguished professor of history at Ohio State University and the author of the forthcoming second edition of Crisis and Crossfire: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
